Lost in translation: Understanding the possession of
digital things in the cloud. In Proceedings of the ACM
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Systems (Austin, TX, May 5–10). ACM Press, New
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16. Rissland, E.L. Dimension-based analysis of
hypotheticals from Supreme Court oral argument. In
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Catherine C. Marshall ( ccmarshall@cse.tamu.edu) is an
adjunct professor of computer science and engineering
and affiliate of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries
at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX; she lives in
San Francisco, CA, and volunteers at the Internet Archive
( https://www.archive.org/).

Frank M. Shipman ( shipman@tamu.edu) is a professor of
computer science and engineering and associate director
of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas
A&M University, College Station, TX.

online behavior: architecture, law,
market forces, and social norms. As
seen in the overall responses in our
studies, social norms seem to have an
outsized effect on participants’ perceptions of what they (and others) can do
with user-contributed content. Even
social-media-savvy participants have
little understanding of the relevant
legal guidelines. Software-based governance is easy to ignore or thwart.
And much reuse is oblivious to market
forces. Furthermore, social norms are
often nonreciprocal in action; participants in our studies did not always apply the same standards to themselves
that they did to others, especially in
non-abstract practical situations. This
lack of reciprocity is not uncommon in
other aspects of online behavior and
may be attributed to individual users’
ability to reflect on their own motives
and intentions but not those of others.

What are the design and policy implications of these results? For one,
they signal certain design gaps when
media creators use labeling schemes
(such as Creative Commons2); study
participants seemed more sensitive
to actions like reuse when they are offered examples rather than abstract
labels. Hypothetical examples of reuse, especially those based on the
media being labeled, may be helpful
for extending Web users’ understanding of the abstract ideas expressed by
labels. It is no accident that our final
norm addresses highly circumstantial
factors as the nature of the content
(such as “Is it personal?”), the differential scope of the audience (such as
“Is the content going viral or is it play-ing to an audience of 10?” and “How
different is the scope from the original?”), the type of reuse (such as is the
content used in a way that highlights
the original intent?), and the way the
implied (or explicit) social contract
between all potential owners of both
the original and derived work is handled (such as “Is attribution or anonymity desired?”).

Note only one of these factors—thenature of the content—is known atpublication time, or the time whencontent is usually labeled. Other fac-tors depend on how the content isreused (such as changes in genre, au-dience, or publication venue). Stillothers are not revealed until time haspassed (such as the differential scopeof the audience). That these factorsare crucial to how a labeling schemeis used makes us think that supple-mental mechanisms might be desir-able; scenarios, hypotheticals, andmixed-initiative dialogs help contentcreators better envision many types ofreuse or decide between attribution oranonymity or triggers that reveal whenthe scope or audience has changed.Still others depend on, say, the moti-vations for storing content. Past worktells us that individuals archive workthat is not their own just as surely asinstitutions do. 15

Ownership-driven questions need
to be approached thoughtfully, lest
we impose legal restrictions when
none are necessary or fail to anticipate normal actions that will trigger reactions that could have been
averted. Gaps between desired policy
and current social norms may yet
be bridged through education and
thoughtful design.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley, for supporting
the studies on which this article is
based. Thanks, too, to the study participants for their patient and thoughtful
completion of the lengthy surveys.

References

1. Aufderheide, P, Jaszi, P., Bieze, K., and Boyle, J. L.

Copyright, Free Speech, and the Public’s Right to Know:
How Journalists Think About Fair Use. SSRN, Elsevier,
July 30, 2012; http://ssrn.com/abstract=2119933

2. Boyle, J. The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of
the Mind. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2008.

9. Marshall, C. C. and Shipman, F. M. Social media
ownership: Using Twitter as a window onto current
attitudes and beliefs. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems